Category Archives: Blogs by Loren Cordain

An ongoing controversy about dietary salt (either refined salt or sea salt) in human ancestral diets represents a significant point of contention for the Paleo Diet community. Some popular bloggers contend that ingested high levels of dietary salt have no adverse effects upon our health and wellbeing1-10. My scientific colleagues and I disagree with these conclusions11-34. The Table below clearly demonstrates that high sodium diets (greater than 2300 mg/day) are virtually impossible to achieve when eating a 2000 to 2500 kcal/day diet consisting of normal selections of un-adulterated, non-salted wild or domesticated foods. References [1] Kresser C. Shaking Up…

Introduction: The Belief that Added Salt is Paleo Look no further than the increasing number of bestselling “Paleo” diet cookbooks1-7, or “Paleo” diet website recipes8-16 and you can fully appreciate the near unanimity of authors whose recipes embrace sea salt or salt as fundamental ingredients in an otherwise Paleo-friendly meal. Somehow, somewhere most people in the Paleo community have been led to believe that added sea salt or salt can be safely included in contemporary Paleo diets with no long-term, adverse health effects, and that high salt intakes were a normal part of ancestral, hunter-gatherer diets. At least, this is…

[Part One in our Series on Why the Paleo Diet is a Nutrient Dense Diet] In April, news of a recent two-year study exploring the effects of a Paleo diet on postmenopausal women was presented at the 2016 Endocrine Society Annual Meeting. Soon afterwards, an article hit the web detailing the positive results, but quickly shifted its focus to interviews with members of the nutrition community who focused more on their issues with the diet. In this part 1 of our Nutrient Density Series Dr Cordain addresses these critiques and shows that when you just delve a little deeper into…

Loren Cordain, Ph.D. joins Brett on That Paleo Show to discuss the latest developments in Paleo and to clarify some common misconceptions. Stream the podcast below and visit That Paleo Show for more information. Check back soon for Mark Smith’s That Paleo Show podcast soon!

Some people following the Paleo diet eat quinoa and other pseudo-grains as grain alternatives based on the encouragement of others in the nutrition community who tout quinoa as a “super-food.” Dr Cordain answers a reader’s question about why the high saponin content of quinoa can cause digestive issues and why we should be careful about reading too much into any single study. Dave Chiasson on August 24, 2016 wrote: I just read this: “What the Science Says Emerging research appears to contradict the idea that saponins from quinoa cause inflammation. Researchers examined the inflammatory effect of saponins from quinoa. Contrary…

Sugar is likely the most over consumed substance in the modern world 1 On top of our endless addiction to soda (sugar water essentially) – sugar is surreptitiously added to nearly every processed food.2 As a result, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) now reports that the average American ingests 150-170 pounds of sugar per year.3 This overconsumption of sugar may very well be killing us. As I’ve previously written, sugar is the precursor and the ‘canary in the coalmine’ – to numerous diseases and unhealthy conditions. Diabetes? Check.4 Obesity? Check.5 Even Alzheimer’s has been directly linked to too…

As the Paleo movement has grown, many within the community have broadened the original template to include other ingredients that we at ThePaleoDiet.com do not feel should be included as a Paleo staple. This is not to say that these additions should never be consumed, we have always agreed, that for most people, non-Paleo foods can be included in a healthy diet with an 85:15, Paleo:non-Paleo ratio. But even if an ingredient can be argued as natural, one should still assess the likely availability, and hence its evolutionary influence upon humans, while also examining the current scientific literature with respect…

More than most sciences, the nutrition world is rife with debate and wildly different recommendations. Normally the debates center around our common knowledge of nutrition: macro- and micronutrients; glycemic index; caloric balance; etc. But sometimes it’s what we don’t know – or at least what few know – that’s important. One example is Advanced Glycated End Products or AGEs. Still new and not well understood within the nutrition world, these molecules can have a big impact on our health. And they are found in our food. Loren Cordain, PhD explained AGEs in a recent post, but you our readers asked…

Introduction: Obesity in Western Societies Unless you’ve been camping out for the past 20 years, you are probably aware that Americans are the fattest people in the world. The latest National Institute of Health (NIH) survey indicates that 68.8 % of all American adults are overweight or obese. The easiest way to determine body composition and weight classification is to calculate the body mass index (BMI). Simply divide body weight in kilograms (kg) by height in meters squared (Table 1). Table 1. Body Mass Index (BMI) categories where BMI = [body weight (kg)/height (m2)]. World Health Organization (WHO), 2004…

Introduction In a previous blog post (//thepaleodiet.com/north-american-plains-indians -tall-and -robust-meat-eaters-but-not-a-milk-drinker-among-them/) I demonstrated how the diets of North American Plains Indians during the 19th century allowed them to become the tallest humans in the world. All available evidence indicates 1-4 that they ate a very high (76–85% of total calories) 1 animal based diet throughout their lives, primarily from consumption of buffalo (Bison bison) meat and organs, as I have shown in my last blog post. With a high animal based diet, one of the inherent problems that these peoples surely must have known was that unlimited and high consumption of lean…

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